A.G Lafley (former P&G CEO and current Chairman of the board) and  Ram Charan write in The Game Changer: How Every Leader Can Drive Everyday Innovation about the gulfs between silos that separate ideas and make innovation lousy.

One gulf separates technology people, who produce and shape ideas, from the upstream marketing people who do the segmentation and study consumer behavior. A second exists between those who produce final prototypes of an innovation and the commercialization people who have to take it to the first moment of truth. Eliminating these gulfs and creating simultaneous interactions among experts for making the right trade-offs – through a smooth functioning integrated process of innovation -reduces risk and expands the opportunity.

Lafley and Charan mention eight ways to anticipate and minimize the risks of innovation:

1. know your customer
2. do prototyping
3. do rigorous consumer testing
4. manage the portfolio of innovation projects
5. be open to experimenting
6. identify the killer issues early
7. learn from the past
8. use metrics to measure innovation